Starship IFT 4 5-minute Flight Synopsis: with Replay

Hello and welcome to the Terran Space Academy and to a synopsis of Integrated Flight Test 4. Here you see the Starship engine starting to light up. All 33 engines come online and are running fine. And then you see them lose one engine. It doesn't seem to slow the ship down much. It's still progressing fine, accelerating rapidly, clearing the tower with no problem, starting its pitch over maneuver. So then it goes on up and continues the burn. Right now everything seems to be going fine. I don't see any issues or problems. We've come up to hot staging. The hot staging seems to work fine. They're going to get rid of that extra ring. And now you see the booster engines coming online for the boost back burn and then shutting down. And they get rid of the hot stage ring so that they can get rid of that extra mass. They won't be doing that in the future. They'll think up something else. One of our associates said that perhaps the landing legs of the Starship could work for the hot staging. And I think that would be excellent. Here you see them lighting back up the engines. And one does not light. There's supposed to be 13 engines lit here. And you see that one did not light. And then those engines go out. You've just got three to control it on the way down. And they have a successful landing of the booster in the ocean. So that one engine out probably means it's not quite ready to try to land on the launch tower. But who knows? Maybe Elon will say, you know, good enough. We can do it like this. I'm not sure why they had the relight problems. They'll let us know later. So the ship is very stable in flight. We no longer have this uncontrolled roll. It stays in a very good position as it circles the earth and gets ready to come back in and re-enter. And approaching 100 kilometers, which is what we call space, but really it's hitting some air already. And above 100 kilometers, you're going to see plasma building up. 100 kilometers is where they estimated that airplanes couldn't fly. Here we are at 105 kilometers. You're clearly seeing plasma build up. So it's getting pretty hot. Now this has been sped up. So it's a time lapse. We reach the peak heat. Now the temperature will reach a peak before the heat load, right? So you've got the temperature rising and then you've got something called heat load. So how long does the ship bake in the oven? So here it's doing fine. We don't see anything going wrong at all. It's tolerating the plasma. But the longer that plasma is there, and remember this is hot oxygen plasma with a 21 percent oxygen, the rest is nitrogen, it's going to start having some effect. We see some sparks coming off. So it's pretty evident that a few things are starting to cook here. And then you see the flame starting to, you see sparks coming off from the upper part. But if you watch on that wing there, now this is nothing scary. This is just the upper flaps moving. And you can see the orientation of the starship is exactly like it's supposed to be. This is a really good controlled entry. But here you see a burn through. So the hinge joint is not sealed well enough and you've got burn through, burning away steel, burning away part of that wing. Now many will see this as a failure. The fact that this ship goes on to land in the ocean successfully tells me that this is a really robust ship. Now they do need to fix this. And perhaps they will put an extension out so that there's something stronger to go out past that hinge joint. But letting the plasma go up through the hinge joint's a bad idea. And here you see steel burning. So this is steel burning away in hot plasma. Plasma torches cut steel all the time and this ship is flying through a giant plasma torch. Of course here we get, you know, the camera's been damaged. We can't really see what's going on as well. You can see pieces of steel continue to tear away. I thought at this point they were going to lose that flap. They were going to lose the flight. But you can see from telemetry that the orientation of the ship is still right on the money. Everything's looking good. It's slowing down rapidly. Now it started slowing down before, you know, 100 kilometers. But after 100 kilometers the atmosphere gets a lot thicker. It also seemed to kind of coast along in the upper upper atmosphere around between 60 and 80 kilometers. Perhaps bleeding off speed before it got to the thicker atmosphere. Now here you can see that the flap survived enough that it is moving. And you will see, okay there you go, you can see it. And you will, if you watch telemetry, you will see the ship do the flip and burn. And that's the main thing it wanted to survive to. So now it's flipping. The engines are on. It's flipping. I don't know why it doesn't show the engines lit. But clearly they are. Perhaps the telemetry wasn't going coming through well enough. But that's it. Landing burn. Splash down in the ocean. A completely successful IFT-4, except for those engine outages. Thanks for watching and stay safe. Ad Astra Pro Terra.